Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

oon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not understand: like me, Pi
cture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if the child were a torc
h in a long dark tunnel. 'A fine child, captain,' he told me, 'a child of d
ignity: you hardly notice his ears.'
That day, however, my son was not with us.
New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place the biscuity perfume of th
e J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalki ness of crumbling pla
ster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto rickshaw drivers, st
arved into fatalism by rising petrol costs; and green grass smells from th
e circular park in the middle of the whirling traffic, mingled with the fr
agrance of con men persuading foreigners to change money on the black mark
et in shadowy archways, From the India Coffee House, under whose marquees
could be heard the endless babbling of gossips, there came the less pleasa
nt aroma of new stories beginning: intrigues marriages quarrels, whose sme
lls were all mixed up with those of tea and chili pakoras. What I smelled
in Connaught Place: the begging nearby presence of a scar faced girl who h
ad once been Sundari the too beautiful; and loss of memory, and turning to
wards the future, and nothing really changes… turning away from these olfa
ctory intimations, I concentrated on the all pervasive and simpler odours
of (human) urine and animal dung.
Underneath the colonnade of Block F in Connaught Place, next to a pavement
bookstall, a paan wallah had his little niche. He sat cross legged behind a
green glass counter like a minor deity of the place: I admit him into thes
e last pages because, although he gave off the aromas of poverty, he was, i
n fact, a person of substance, the owner of a Lincoln Continental motor car
, which he parked out of sight in Connaught Circus, and which he had paid f
or by the fortunes he earned through his sales of contraband imported cigar
ettes and transistor radios; for two weeks each year he went to jail for a
holiday, and the rest of the time paid several policemen a handsome salary.
In jail he was treated like a king, but behind his green glass counter he
looked inoffensive, ordinary, so that it was not easy (without the benefit
of a nose as sensitive as Saleem's) to tell that this was a man who knew ev
erything about everything, a man whose infinite network of contacts made hi
m privy to secret knowledge… to me he provided an additional and not unplea
sant echo of a similar character I had known in Karachi during the time of
my Lambretta voyages; I was so busy inhaling the familiar perfumes of nosta
lgia that, when he spoke, he took me by surprise.
We had set up our act next to his niche; while Pictureji busied himself po
lishing flutes and donning an enormous saffron turban, I performed the fun
ction of barker. 'Roll up roll up once in a life time an opportunity such
as this ladees, ladahs, come see come see come see! Who is here? No common
bhangi; no street sleeping fraud; this, citizens, ladies and gents, is th